Posted
by
Zonk
on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @05:24PM
from the love-the-stats dept.

SirBruce writes "Mmogchart.com has been updated to Version 20.0! This is a major update, with updated numbers for many games, most notably World of Warcraft, Eve Online, RuneScape, and most of NCSoft's titles. I've also added three new MMOGs to the tracking data: Tibia, The Matrix Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. I've also removed the old subscriber data for Ragnarok Online in Japan, and unified the various total subscriptions charts. Also new to this update is preliminary market data for Asian MMOGs (including Ragnarok Online) that are commonly reported in terms of Peak Concurrent Users and Average Concurrent Users. Given the differences in pricing models, many of these games are not subscription-based, so a direct comparison with subscription MMOGs cannot be made. My thanks to everyone who helped with this update, and thanks to those of you who waited patiently for this update!"

Hoe can that be possible? Those card are to be used on a particular suscribed account, player do not open a new account for every card.

That said, they probably have a lot of non-active account that still count as "subscriptions". I have 2, and although I don't pay for them any longuer, I know they are waiting for me...And I know of at least 3 or 4 people doing the same thing. Do we all count as suscribers?

Yes, in fact each of your two accounts counts as an individual subscriber in Blizzard's reported numbers. It's the same thing as hard drive manufacturers defining a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes instead of the way the rest of the computer world does (namely, 1024^3=1,073,741,824 bytes) - they artificially inflate the numbers for marketing/advertising purposes.

How many gigabits in one gigabyte? If the answer is not 8 then you're wrong. Now, how many gigabits are sent in one second at 1Gb/s? Again, the only correct answer is 1000000000. Now, how many bits in one gigabit? Once again, 1000000000. Add Byte=Bit*8 to these bits of unit information and you can see that 1GB is 1000000000 Bytes. Just because some ignorant programmers in the 70s thought 1024 was 'close enough' to 1000 doesn't mean its ok for educated people 30 years later to think ~1074 is still clo

Just because some ignorant programmers in the 70s thought 1024 was 'close enough' to 1000 doesn't mean its ok for educated people 30 years later to think ~1074 is still close enough to 1000.

It is interesting how we can forget most of the history of computers just to suite our purpose. It is even more interesting how we decide to flame those who set it up because it doesn't suite our purpose.

Those idiot programers from the 70's were working with somethign called something like binary data and the binary sy

World of Warcraft's Paying Customer DefinitionWorld of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players having accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or canceled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.

If you buy multiple game cards, as someone else pointed it, it's still tied to the same individual account, so you still only get counted once. Now, the same individual could set up multiple accounts with different characters, but that's true for any MMOG. They'll be paying double for that. The cards don't expire, but they run in real time, so once activated, you only have that many days to enjoy the game. Then they expire.

People playing in the Internet Game Rooms aren't buying boxes with a free month, either.

It's possible to get double-counted if you logged in via a game room, and then liked the game so much you went out and subscribed or bought a game card. But that would only last for 7 days.

DDO is pretty new, it needs time to get its subscription base up. Its a fun game, although it does have content issues. My only fear is that at the moment its a biut shitzoid- it seems there's an MMO camp and a D&D camp among its devs. THe MMO camp adds things like raid dungeons where only 2 people get loot per raid (with a randomized loot algorithm, so you may pick your two people and they still get shit loot) with a 3 day wait before you can re-enter. Hopefully that bullshit will be killed in the

Maybe next time, Atari and the game creators will listen to the beta testers, who blasted DDO for lack of content and the dreaded "lack of solo content". (Though you don't play Dungeons & Dragons solo, so why should the MMO have it in it????)I was in the beta for a long time, and I knew every dungeon by heart. So did everyone else that played it for a while. It's hard to find a game riveting when you know where all the traps are, what all the encounters look like, and which ones were more worth repea

Guild wars isn't techincally an MMO, since everything is instanced. Also, since there are no monthly fees, 1million+ copies sold doesn't translate into 1million current players.
Its still my favorite game, and online experience, even if its not an MMO.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no browser-based MMORPGs on MMOG chart, as you should see a mention of for example Urban Dead which count enough players to be in. So what's wrong with BBMMORPGS? Do they not appear on this site because they are browser based or because they are free?

There are four main reasons why a particular game isn't listed in the charts:

a) The game in question isn't really a MMOG, at least by my reckoning. Games like Diablo II and Phantasy Star Online fall into this category. Guild Wars developers say in their own FAQ that they do not consider their game a MMOG; in addition, it doesn't charge a monthly fee (see below). Please don't email me trying to insist otherwise; I'm not likely to be convinc

The first big slide for SWG players on that chart is Aug-Sept 2004, which predates the release of the CU by seven or eight months. The second dive (after the short level period) is pretty close to the time the CU got released. The downward slope doesn't really change much after that, so it could be said the NGE had no effect on subscriber numbers, either positively or negatively. The game was already into its death spiral.

And it looks like an awful lot of them are playing EVE now. Their sub numbers started slowly curving up around the time of that first dip and really took off after the second one. I guess all the Han Solo wannabes decided a rich space environment was better than a rapidly depopulating planetary environment.

SWG is actually rated as a C on his numbers page for accuracy, some "inside source" told him they had 120k subscribers without station access or time cards, and he just artificially bumped it up. Truth be told I know a lot of station access people including myself who don't actually even log into SWG and I don't imagine they have time cards flying off the shelves. That 120k might either be a lie or a lot of accounts that simply haven't expired yet. I know more people in SWG that multiboxed than in any other

Sony has this funny little thing called Station Access, which gives you access to pretty much all SOE games. If you want to play two SOE games (e.g., EQ2 and Planetside), you're marginally cheaper off buying a Station Access. If just want the extras in one game (e.g., extra character slots and some other advantages in EQ2), they're often _only_ available as Station Access.Once a game has been activated under Station Access, there's no way to say "nope, I don't want to play this one any more" as long as you

The chart looked about as I expected: World of Warcraft towers above the rest while several other MMOs lose ground. But what I didn't expect to see is that WoW's gains are significantly higher than its competitors' losses. World of Warcraft is doing more than dominating the market--it's increasing the size of the market.

I'm interested to see whether those gamers will move to other MMO games after World of Warcraft or if they're only in it for WoW.

Bingo.First, look at the "Total Active Subscribers" chart, the one that does not divide things out by MMORPG. It's a relatively smooth curve. If you didn't know when WoW was released, you wouldn't be able to tell by this chart.

Now look at the "Total Active Subscribers - Absolute Contribution" chart. You'll see that the total non-WoW market had about 6.5 million subscribers at the WoW release date, and since then has only dropped by 250,000.

Blizzard would have got a lot of people (like me) from their other RTS games. Also for mac users (like me) the games market is much more limited, and we're happy that Blizzard have always supported macs.

I remember playing Warcraft II on a Mac 7168 (or something like that). What a blessing that was. My dad had picked up a game pack that had a few (pretty bad) games. But the fact that I could play Warcraft I & II was awesome. Both were great games.

Blizzard would have got a lot of people (like me) from their other RTS games

Now if only we could play some sort of 'cross-genre' Starcraft game. Like, what if you were a Ghost and...Seriously, thou

Some of the non-WoW are actually doing rather well. RuneScape, for example, a MMPORPG that people thought was dead and buried, is actually on the upswing. Final Fantasy XI was going up as of July 05. Heck, Final Fantasy is now bigger than Everquest. Everquest one and two basically leveled off and stayed there, instead of dropping into nothing. Eve Online, another "dead 'n buried" one is on the upswing and headed towards OK. Asheron's Call 1's numbers are much lower than I had expected, but Turbine mus

It can't account for people with more than one subscription. The game companies themselves can't account for it, either, since you could have a completely different name and credit card associated with the account. Still, you're paying twice, so you're essentially two customers any way you look at it, and deserve to be counted twice.

Do you? I don't know if this is a fair look at the market place though. It inflates the actual number of users. If WoW has over 50% of the "marketshare" theoretically that amount of people COULD be the market place if everyone who played every other MMORPG also played WoW.

I don't think this chart really tells us anything other than WoW is popular, other games are less popular, which unless you live under a rock, you already know.

It gives you and idea how many SUBSCRIPTIONS are out there. It makes little difference to your business plan if it's 2 people subscribing once or one person subscribing twice; you still get the same amount of money. If you want an idea of revenue potential, you can find that in other financial reports.It also gives you an idea of relative popularity. You may already know that WoW is more popular than anything else, but did you know it's approximately half the market? Did you know RuneScape is more popul

Actually it makes a huge difference whether its two people subscribing to two mmorgps or one person subscribing to two. In the first scenario you're looking at two distinct incomes, in the second you're looking at a single income.If for example the average MMORPG player was found to subscribe to 2 MMORPGs, you have a much different marketing job if you're trying to pull 1 person away from 1 MMORPG to subscribe to yours or whether your just have to appeal to those two individuals and get them to pick up a se

One very important thing to note is that the last data point for a ton of the games on his list is June 2005 -- one example being Everquest 2.

The other thing to note is tabulating subscribers. In some of the Asian markets (can't tell you which ones in specific as I just looked this up myself) the Internet Game Rooms are very popular. You go in and buy an account that you then add points to on an hourly basis. Anyone who logs into one of those is counted for seven full days afterward by Blizzard as a paying subscriber. I'm sure there's lots of people who don't spend $15 American monthly on World of Warcraft but are counted as equal subscribers among their monthly-account-paying European and American brethren. Just as a reference it's about $3.73 to buy an account that you can spend points on and it costs a nickel an hour after that for gametime in WoW China, as per a Blizzard press release and Google's money translation calculator.

It's interesting to see what the Asian market means in terms of body count, but it makes me wonder what the relative revenue situations are like.

If you had read the official Blizzard press released, then you'd know they only count active Internet Game Room accounts which have been active in the last 7 days. So yes, their figures can be taken at face value. From http://www.blizzard.com/press/060119.shtml [blizzard.com]

World of Warcraft's Customer Definition

World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with on

No shit, sherlock, if you read my post I specifically mentioned that. Would you consider someone who paid under $4.00 for their account and drops a nickel an hour on it the equivalent of someone who paid $50 for the box and spends $15 a month? Let alone someone who may have *only* played the account for an hour and is then counted for the next seven days.

It's like counting every single person who dropped a dollar on an arcade game as being part of its loyal fanbase. It just ain't so.

Well, the fact that they're only counted as subscribers for merely 7 days indicates that only very few of those "unloyal" customers people who've only played for, say, an hour get counted as subscribers. 7 days is a very short period of time for an MMO subscription length - that's the key here. Those Internet Game Room account owners who play very irregularly, or only only used it once to get a taste for what WoW's like, should have a negligible impact on the statistics. In order for such unloyal customers

It's not like counting every single person who dropped a dollar on an arcade game as a fan of that game, because Blizzard does not count every IGR account every created as a subscription.

I meant in the last week, obviously. Can we honestly say the average IGR patron who plays World of Warcraft at least once a week plays it for the 300 hours monthly or ten hours daily that would be required for their subscription to net Blizzard $15 a month (ignoring the initial $45+ discrepancy)?

Um, WoW has about 1 million subscribers in Europe and 1.5-2 million in the US market. If you want to discount all the Asian markets, the chart would look even MORE lopsided: EQ et al. would have under 300k, WoW would have 3 million, and Lineage I & II and Runescape wouldn't even be there in between.

That's neat, I don't really care either way, I'm not trying to defend games, I'm just mentioning that there's something called analysis that needs to be done. Things up to and including the vastly different Asian market, statistics that are almost a year old at this point presented alongside current statistics, that kind of thing.

What, you mean the one where the original Everquest, among others, is given an A for accuracy despite using year-old datapoints? Where WoW is rated an A for accuracy? This in spite of the part where he mentions that he chose to disregard the people who use IGRs without a full monthly plan from Lineage because it would skew the results, but doesn't even pay lip service to why he includes the same population he threw out from Lineage in his World of Warcraft numbers.

...believing this guys numbers. yeah, some of them may be accurate. Blizzard has been tooting their horn with their subscription numbers. But, I've been playing Star Wars Galaxies since the beginning back in 2003 and there is no way they currently have just under 200,000 subscribers. The number of subscribers has the be half or even 3/4 of what it was in it's peak. So, I know that number to be just wrong. What other numbers are just wrong? EverQuest still has 400,000 subscribers???

There are thousands of articles around as to why WoW did well, from it's existing franchise, to taking the Warhammer minature artwork through to the game, to simplification and a slick interface.
But I had had my does of EQ1 and to be honest find them all very boring these days. I am waiting for a generation shift, something new to come to the genre. Compare the gameplay of an MMO with the gameplay of a moden single player RPG like Oblivion, or the gameplay of Half-life 2. It's a huge gap still. Ever g

Planetside is like this. The only grinding you do is for rank, which involves killing lots of other players and capturing bases. I enjoyed it for a while, but left due to a lack of bug fixes and content updates. Oh god, and the nerfs. It seemed like they would nerf anything someone complained about in the forums, legit or not. I remember logging in one day and it suddenly took like 20 grenades to take down a single soldier, 4 shots with a sniper rifle, etc. All in the name of balanced play.

I was shocked to see Guildwars missing. Some argue its not really an MMO, as it is a hub-centred world, however it shares this with DDO (which has been listed on mmogchart.com). I hope to see it listed in future, as the last subscriber numbers I saw put it near 1,000,000 people!

Guildwars isn't a traditional MMO in that it doesn't have a monthly charge. It's a one-time purchase with online play. Charting GuildWars would be like charting Diablo, Freelancer, Battlefield 2, or any other online enabled game with some sort of player stat tracking.

It seems to me the best way to chart these games would be some sort of income model rather than just raw population, and you could still compare how much money a game with a monthly fee has made compared to one without it. I wonder if the data's out there. Raw game population doesn't mean much when you take into account the vastly different pricing schemes, especially in different parts of the world, across all of these MMOs.

As for GW, if DDO is on there you can't rule out Guild Wars by just gameplay, and

Revenue numbers are interesting, but they don't tell the whole picture, either. A game with 1,000 subscribers paying $1,000 month for some amazing virtual experience would clock in at $1,000,000, whereas a game with 100,000 subscribers pay $10 a month would look the same. You wouldn't be able to tell from that that the second game was actually vastly more popular, and the other game seemed to cater to some rich elite with money to burn. Really, ALL of these data points are useful in different ways at diff

I'm not surprised. WoW outbeats all MMOGs in the 'market' simply because it is well written, well designed, very scriptable and fun for players of all sorts. Also the amount of support sites for WoW is staggering. And yes, with 6.5 million subscribers Blizzard is generating a lot of cash. With the paraphernalia and the planned movie it will only increase it's marketshare.

It's like looking at a fantasy painting. A storybook illustration. All pretty and soft and pastel. Every other MMORPG screenshot I've seen is harsh and gritty and unappealing compared to the smooth pretty of WOW.

And it also got big enough that it has the social network effect. Wanna try one of these MMORPGs you keep hearing about? You probably want to play one your friends are on! They'll help you out and you can play with them.

"Friends"? What the hell are "friends"? They seem like something I'd be interested in. Where can I get some of these "friends"? Are they available at the local drugstore?

Seriously though, the few friends that I have aren't interested in MMORPGs. I "meet" plenty of other players in-game though. Sure I don't "really" know them, and they don't "really" know me, but they recognize my character.

I don't play MMORPGs except for the occasional dip into SL. Most of my friends are aware of MMORPGs, maybe half of them played them before WoW.

I think nowadays pretty much everyone I know who plays these things is on WoW and/or SL. People fool with other games, but it's these two that they keep mentioning regularly....that, or Endless Forest.

Prettyish terrain. Got no idea how appealing the characters might be, and that's what's important - WoW has these kinda-cartoony characters. (The gallery didn't work on Safari; I got the bg image overlapping the links and images and everything!)

Oh yeah, Mac client on launch might be part of why WoW did well too. Every single Mac gamer could get in on the ground floor with their friends instead of coming after their friends had already burned through it all.

I think you meant to say that PlayOnline gave out real figures for subscribers BEFORE September 2004, but haven't had anything since then except the census. I got a soft confirmation from a source on the 650K number, but that's still from last year in any case.

Let's look closely at that chart for a moment. Everquest's subscription numbers from July 2001 till July 2004 is a nice, straight line hovering at just under 500k subscribers, with a slight bump right before WoW was released. WoW, by contrast, started at zero during September 2004, and has basically taken a straight line path up to 6.5 million today.

I would say that that indicates that WoW subscribers are coming from somewhere other than Everquest. In

My guess is that it's one of the first MMOGs to not punish the player for doing ordinary things. I remember the horror stories from EQ were people would lose weeks of progress each time they died, and then would die a few more times trying to get their uberloot corpses back. The people I know who left WoW went to "harder" games, such as EQ2, since they couldn't fathom playing a game that didn't try to screw you over at every turn.

EQ2 is a game with, basically, no death penalty that has almost nothing in the way of camping and encounter locking to prevent most possible griefing. Travel time is incredibly light. EXP comes fast. It may be harder in the sense of gameplay mechanics but I can't imagine how WoW could possibly be more friendly except to give you levels for free.

I hate this type of post because it's pointless. Of course many people consider WOW the worst because it's very popular. Every single person is unique and to make a game that appeals to everyone is impossible. What one person might find fun another might hate. What you find boring another finds interesting. There is nothing wrong with that and that is why there are so many genres of games.

I wouldn't consider WoW one of the worst. I no longer play, but I'd rate it among the best- low grind to cap, low penalties. Until they overpowered the game with raid items (meaning you had to raid to PvP) and killed world PvP with battlegrounds, it was fun. I far prefer it to most of the others in its genere- the Lineages, the EQs, the FFXI grind fests.

"Yes, I played it, yes, I was bored stiff after 3 months."Ppff. That's not a problem with the game per say, it's a problem with the genre. One I share, in fact. I've played quite a number of MMO's, and I find that they ALL get extremely boring, it's just a matter of how soon. I've given up on ever finding a MMO that isn't a complete waste of time and money.

Quite frankly, I think that if we want to see the relization of the persistent virtual world, we desperatly need to grow beyond these immature fantasy ro

You didn't like it, you were bored after 3 months...therefore EVERYONE shouldn't like it and be bored stiff.Lineage has the second highest...have you played that? I can't see the draw for that one either, but obviously someone likes it.

Hey, we're all different. Blizzard can't please everyone all the time. You either like it, or don't. Don't take it so personally. Should everyone like or dislike the same movies? Books? You ask what makes the game interesting...but what could anyone say to change your mind? W

So tell me why, in case you enjoy the game. I really wish to know what makes WoW interesting. What is better than in the "other" MMORPGs? What makes WoW to something that deserves a 50+% market share?

I like it because it's straightforward. There's not a lot of non-game activity required to play the game. The quests are straightforward, the game mechanics are straightforward, the class roles are straightforward. For the vast majority of the content, you either can do it on your own or can find a group within a few minutes by barking up the appropriate tree. I don't have to deal with idiotic guild politics and teen-aged angst, I don't have to deal with planning out my skill progression, I don't have to research where the best equipment is. I can do it all without all that junk.

On the other hand, the game does have those elements to it, but they're optional. For people who want to form guilds and take down huge monsters and collect phat loot, they can do that, and have a good time at it. I don't want to, and the game works well for me; other people want to, and the game works well for them.

Overall, I think that's what it has going for it. The game caters to basically all gaming styles.

>>>I like it because it's straightforward. There's not a lot of non-game activity required to play the game. The quests are straightforward, the game mechanics are straightforward, the class roles are straightforward.

I'm guessing you are new to MMORPGs, when you have few under your belt repetitiveness and sameness typical of WoW will not be something you want to experience.

You can compare WoW to a bland sitcom, while it delivers all typical elements it lacks wit, creativity and originality. I

The main draw that other people have mentioned is that with so many people playing, it's easier to get an impression of the game before you start playing. Also, odds are that if you're interesting in starting WoW, you know someone who's been playing for a while and might be willing to toss you a few gold and invite you to join their guild. The main reason I play WoW instead of a different MMORPG is because I had many friends and relatives that played WoW as opposed to the one person I knew who played Ragnar

Crafting needs to be overhauled to allow customization; not only should blacksmiths and such be able to change the appearance of their creations to a degree but they should also be able to affect the bonuses an item gives. The higher the crafter's skill, the more bonuses can be stacked on the item. Jewelcrafting and socketed items are nice, but not good enough.

Given the massive database problems such customization caused Sony in Star Wars Galaxies, I'd be careful what you wish for... you might just get it.

I disagree completely. WoW isn't popular because of marketing. It's popular because it's the only MMORPG out there which is fun to play right from the start. You don't need to wait until you're level X before you can go on adventures or get cool items and spells. You don't need to spend a week to get used to the user interface. WoW's a fast MMO that rewards the player immediately, and hardly ever punishes him for things such as getting killed, not having a 2nd account/computer, or not having lots of gold and thus not being able to buy the best possible gear. It's very easy for somebody new to get into the game and start playing right away. It makes you think "hey, this is fun" right away. Most MMOs throw the new player into the complicated game world after a 5-minute tutorial, whereas in WoW the first entire zone is tailored for new players, and there are always directions on where to go next.

Why are you people so desperate for attention? It's not enough to be the enlightened minority, your insecurity has you constantly challenging the majority to defend their "inferior" taste. God, the anti-WoW baiters are worse than the Digg whiners.But do you really want to know why it works? Aside from the detailed backstory, extensible user interface, well-defined gameplay mechanics, and superior art and music - it's because you can jump. It has the feel of a first-person shooter with the controls of an RTS

Really? that makes me all the more intrigued about Guild Wars. Diablo was a far better game WoW ever thought about being. "Controls of an RTS" is exactly what I HATED most about WoW, that and the fact that all the professions were nerfed to uselessness.

Actually I think Blizzard did a fairly good job of keeping professions in line with everything else in the game. For instance I just made my Robes of the Archmage which are on par with any but the top 1% of raid armor for a mage, they took me about two weeks of casual grinding for gold through quests and some outright grinding.

Let me preface this by saying that the only other MMO i've ever played was FFXI. I played for about a year, starting when the ps2 version came out, and had a high level paladin. I've been on WoW for ~3 months.1. WoW looks pretty. I don't find the music annoying and repetitive (yet), and the ui is highly customizable.

2. Less grind. I found the grind fun in FFXI, and that's what the game is mostly about. The problem arises when you're sitting around waiting for hours for a xp party. Even at low levels during

The moon has to be the right phase, which only occurs for 1 hour every real day or 2.

Because I happen to know how to find this out...

In Vana'diel (the world FFXI takes place on), a moon cycle takes 84 Vana'diel days. The moon is divided into 12 phases, each lasting seven days. (The crescent and gibbous phases are doubled compared to Earth moon phases, so those last fourteen days, but it's easier to think of it as 12 phases.)

Vana'diel time runs 25 times faster than Earth time. So a complete moon c

And the only time you really, REALLY have to pay attention to this is if you're trying to HQ a Tier0 or Tier1 synth with the highest possible chance.

Noone I knows pays much attention to moonphase, or even day, when going for skillups, or HQing in Tier3. Tier3 HQ is MUCH less vulnerable to moon/day influences than Tier0-2. And Tier2 is less vulnerable to the effects than 1 or 0, as well.

But don't mind me - I happen to like the FFXI crafting system enough that I have 2 over 90 and 1 over 80...

Before you mod me flamebait, let's rather try to find out just WHY WoW has the share it has. Because, frankly, I can't see the reason. Yes, I played it, yes, I was bored stiff after 3 months.

Did you play with friends? or just pickup groups and solo? I joined way back, played for three months, got bored, put it on the shelf for more than a year. Then got to know a few people in real-life who played, convinced a few more, then it was one of the best games I've played.

"The fastest way to make it suck is to focus on 'beating' the game like you would say half-life or dungeon-seige."I agree with you. Unfortunately, even on RP servers, people are not taking a leisurely, smell-the-roses stroll. Doing anything but the most optimal path is considered a waste of time. Figuring out something on your own never happens. Guildies, pick up groups, friends, they all have done it already and will guide (i.e., rush) you through. It's almost as if level limits trigger a 'get to the end'

WoW was probably the 2nd best MMO i've ever played (1st being Ultima Online way back in the day). Once you're level 60 for a while and do nothing but farming battlegrounds and MC/BWL/ZG, you quickly get bored. Leading upto lvl60 was definitely fun for me though. After that it's a huge grind for a chance to win 1 epic in your farming guild a couple nights a week.

>So tell me why, in case you enjoy the game. I really wish to know what makes>WoW interesting. What is better than in the "other" MMORPGs? What makes WoW>to something that deserves a 50+% market share.1. Strong game IP franchies. People like the Warcraft universe. Of course, IP along is no gaurantee of success; look at Star Wars Galaxies or The Matrix Online.

2. Content, content, content. WoW has a ton of content. You can play it for 6 months and there's still new things to do. Every race has i

##warning this post is from a Eve-online fanboy##WoW sucked up a ton of my time the last couple of years. I know enough about the game, I think, to give you a basic idea of why some people claim it's so awesome, and others (including me) think it's not that great.

Here are 4 points that WoW has going for it. Then, in italics, purely opinion on my part.

1. First of all, the game is dang easy to learn. The first ten levels of the game are nice and slow, in a protected environment, giving you plenty of time

It's stupid to talk about any product "deserving" (or not deserving) market share. Gee, Linux "deserves" to get a better market share because it's OSS and that's a good thing? No, it should get the market share based on its merits. And it's not quite there yet (although arguably close). (You can argue that other products *cough Windows cough* have achieved their market share through less legal means, but that's a different conversation for now)Accordingly, why should WoW deserve to get less market share bec

Remember "The Unix Hater's Handbook?" It mentioned the idea of "Worse is better" and the dominance that this phenomenon allowed Unix to achieve in the early 1990s. However, it holds true still (but Windows, and not Unix, is the target of ire) and not just applied to Operating Systems--the x86 processor architecture has killed off nearly all the far more elegant chip designs, RISC and CISC alike, in the last 10 years. x86 is so bad that Intel doesn't even fab "real" x86 chips anymore; they build what I un

WoW has some good things going for it, but I'm not at all sure that it's the best game of its genre.

It is, however, the best game of its genre that will run on any operating system I'm willing to use.

I've been quite curious as to what percentage of WoW-players are mac-users. My guess is that it's quite high indeed, perhaps somewhere between a quarter and a third. There are what, around fifteen million macs recent enough to run it well in use today? Some nontrivial portion of those fifteen million will